[Steps towards a hospital information system: illustrated by the example of the medical setting of the Westphalian Wilhelms University of Münster].

Implementing hospital information systems for an efficient application of electronic data processing requires the integration of previously introduced departmental systems, which traditionally have been designed only from the viewpoint of an isolated hospital department. Those efforts have to be accompanied by a parallel implementation of a hospital-wide network and the introduction of PC workstations on clinical wards and in outpatient clinics. In this paper currently ongoing efforts at the University Hospital of Münster are presented in order to illustrate how such integration efforts can improve communication and information retrieval in all clinical areas of a hospital.